Interactive Play Space: Bakery Update!

Nearly a month ago, I posted about the beautiful and gorgeous Bakery play space that I created. Now I’m here to talk about what held up and what didn’t.

[Full disclosure: this month turned into two months once summer reading hit. The Bakery was out for 600 hours of play which is double what the Garden Shop was. I expected to see the items more decimated than they actually were!]

1. So, yep, the kids did try to eat some of the pieces. I found a few cookies with what I suspected were bite marks. They immediately were pitched in the trash. (I did the same thing with foam blocks recently — we do not need to keep objects that have teeth marks or that are unsafe for kiddos!)

2. The only truly broken piece was the cupcake displayer. The top of the screw snapped off at some point. I found it during my nightly check and retired the item immediately. I don’t know if it was dropped or manhandled but it wasn’t worth the safety concern of putting it back out. I might try something like this next year to avoid the cost of replacing the no longer made Kidkraft Cupcakes.

3. And let’s talk about theft/loss. The cookies were hit HARD. This is all that was left when I packed up the center. Since it’s such an inexpensive product to replace (around $16 on sale), I’ll likely purchase the Melissa and Doug set again. Originally, I didn’t label them with our library’s name. I might need to do this in the future.

4. The most bizarre piece of destruction that happened — somehow a child managed to get high enough near the play center to tear down the Bakery sign. I lost the letter K and the letter E was mangled. It was a simple felt die-cut fix and I’m not at all worried about the cost of repair ($0.29 for a new felt piece) but more raised eyebrow here.

5. I knew that I’d have to replace the felt cinnamon rolls for the next play center. Grubby hands + lots of velcro pieces on the wooden cupcakes and cookies led to a lot of pilling on the felt. I’m totally okay with replacing these. Plus it will give me a chance to do them a little differently since I’ve read some new techniques on making them!

6. Our two chef hats became one chef hat very early on in the center’s time out in the space. And once I started packing up, I realized it just needed to be thrown out. I’m not sure that I will replace these for the next time the Bakery goes out. I sprayed disinfectant and checked the hat throughout the process, but it got pretty gross looking towards the end.